The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Surprisingly in the circumstances, the seven-member appeal court under its chairman, Otto Glück, made a better stab at getting to the heart of the Wagner/Hitler/Bayreuth/Winifred complex than its predecessor had done. Indeed, the twenty-page document it issued explaining its verdict with arguments from history, psychology and musicology remains well worth reading to this day, even if the verdict itself seems in part at odds with the reasons given for it.25 Rejecting from the start the defence view that in the early years Winifred had been wholly in the shadow of Siegfried and Cosima, the court judged that, on the contrary, it was above all she who had taken the family initiative to back Hitler and to whom the eyes of the public had turned. Later as head of the Wagner dynasty and ‘keeper of the Grail’ during the ‘Third Reich’, she had found herself ‘in the happy position that her personal, political, artistic and entrepreneurial interests all lay on one and the same line’ (original italics). By putting ‘the weight of one of the most famous names in cultural history in the scales for Hitler’ (a more carefully phrased claim than the one about ‘Wagner’s legacy’ made by the prosecution), Winifred had ‘without doubt’ brought the Nazi leader much extra sympathy and more followers.

  Did that imply Wagner’s music itself had inherent appeal for those of a fascist disposition? The court agreed that nationalists (it specifically mentioned Kaiser Wilhelm) had tended to identify the music dramas with a ‘German military spirit’ rooted in myth, but it claimed that this was too narrow an interpretation. Lohengrin, the work that had first fired the young Hitler’s passion for Wagner, was a case in point. Arguably Elsa’s love for Lohengrin was the real core of the piece but Hitler, like many in the Wilhelminian era, had been drawn above all to the patriotic element: a knight in shining armour with a ‘divine mission’ to save Germany. By the time he made his first ‘pilgrimage’ to Wahnfried in 1923, the amateur painter of limited talent and unbounded political ambition had long since come to see in all Wagner’s works a perfect union between art and nationalism. Beyond that Hitler ‘like all usurpers’ had sought a veneer of legitimacy and soon realised what nimbus he stood to gain through association with the Wagner family. It naturally made a world of difference whether one was identified mainly as a rabble-rouser or, on the contrary, as a person able to hobnob as an equal with the intellectual and artistic elite. And the strategy had paid off! In an unusually personal aside, Herr Glück and his men recalled with evident bitterness how Hitler’s followers had gloated triumphantly over their leader’s prestige-boosting relations with Bayreuth and Winifred Wagner.

  All that seemed like grist to the prosecutor’s mill. The judges even conceded at one point that in principle the importance Winifred’s backing had had for Hitler would have justified a more severe sentence. In practice, though, they found extenuating circumstances. Winifred had surely helped a lot of the Nazis’ victims and she had been young and impressionable when Hitler had first burst on the scene. Besides, the court argued (in seeming self-contradiction), her example had probably not induced many Germans to back the Nazis who would not have done so anyway. Had Winifred nonetheless helped deceive foreign governments about the true character of the Nazi Reich because she ran a festival of international prestige regularly attended by the Führer? By no means. Diplomats, the court observed with some irony, were considered clever people with access to much information. They must therefore have known perfectly well what ‘the terrorist’ (i.e. Hitler) was up to, not least since they often saw him in action at Nazi party rallies. As for the wartime festivals, the judges condemned them as ‘hangmen’s breakfasts’ for ‘doomed gladiators and slaves of the arms industry’, but concluded (rightly) that it was Hitler not Winifred who had insisted they be held.

  It is hard to believe that in the changed conditions of late 1948 Winifred would really have been dispossessed and jailed; but given the balance of the arguments that it marshalled, the appeal court might well have confirmed the sentence passed by its predecessor. In fact it did not do even that. Winifred was re-classed as a ‘lesser offender’ rather than an ‘activist’, fined DM6,000 and put on probation for two and a half years. During that time she was to be barred from running, supervising or acquiring a business and, more to the point, from access to any stake she already held in an enterprise as owner or partner. In effect, therefore, the festival assets were to stay frozen and in the hands of a trustee until mid-1951. Just two days after the announcement of this verdict, that is on 10 December 1948, Wieland sailed through denazification with a sentence even his mother regarded as lenient. Judged to have been merely a ‘fellow traveller,’ the Hitler-sponsored heir to the Bayreuth throne was fined DM100 and ordered to pay costs. He did not have to make a personal appearance in court. Bodo Lafferentz with his SS past was scrutinised more carefully, but in February 1949 he was finally classed, like Winifred, as a ‘lesser offender’. Describing him as a man of ‘brilliant ability’, the court (using an increasingly familiar argument) said Germany could not afford to undermine the future of such people without harming itself. In the denazification questionnaires that they had had to complete, neither Wieland nor Lafferentz mentioned his link with the Bayreuth offshoot of Flossenbürg concentration camp.26

  Even the relatively mild sentence handed down by the appeal court was not enforced for long. In January 1949 (taking up a suggestion the court itself had made) Winifred cleared the way for early release from her probation by agreeing to refrain henceforth from ‘organising, administering or running’ the festival. ‘In keeping with a long-cherished plan’, as she put it in a legally binding declaration, these tasks would in future be handled by her sons.27 As a result of this pledge, the Bavarian government agreed a month later that the festival assets should be ‘unfrozen’ prematurely and in April this was done. The process was not, in fact, by any means as smooth as it might seem. Despite denazification and the post-war chaos, Winifred had often toyed with the idea that she might one day re-emerge as festival queen, perhaps with Tietjen at her side again (as artistic adviser if nothing more). Signing herself out of power manifestly cost her dear. The Bavarian government too agonised over its part in the deal. The prime minister, Hans Ehard, grumbled that ‘given Frau Wagner’s political role’ it seemed to him intolerable to treat her better than ‘countless individuals far less compromised’.28 His influential state secretary for cultural affairs, Dieter Sattler, stuck to his view that the shadow cast over the festival during the ‘Third Reich’ could only be dispelled ‘by divorcing Richard Wagner’s works from the Wagner family’.29 All to no avail. In view of the appeal court’s decision, the government could not in any case have blocked return of the assets indefinitely.

  Verena, too, was deeply unhappy over the outcome – not, of course, because the property was being freed at last but because she felt that she and Mausi were being shunted aside by the brothers. Both girls, she stressed in a letter to her mother, had ‘rights’ with respect to the festival that Winifred had a duty to defend, and in principle that seemed true. Hadn’t Siegfried in his will named all four children as equal heirs after Winifred – evidently aiming to give the girls as much future influence on the festival (or at least the chance of it) as the boys? So he had. But by making the assets that had been returned to her available to Wieland and Wolfgang, Winifred was not breaking the letter of the will even if, arguably, she was acting against the spirit of it. She was ‘merely’ using her sons as managers – of a business virtually down-and-out at that. The festival theatre, badly in need of repair, remained her property and the brothers subsequently paid her rent for its use. Wahnfried was still in ruins and working capital all but nonexistent. On the face of it, therefore, Winifred was not so much doing the boys a special favour as handing them, in true Wagnerian fashion, a poisoned chalice. That they then managed to get the festival up and running in only two years says much for their doggedness and skill. Whether the Bayreuth branch of the family, formal denazification notwithstanding, really deserved to be calling the shots again so soon –
or indeed at all – is quite another matter.

  15

  The Road Not Taken

  How different things might have been! Suppose that, with ‘Alberich Hitler’ dead and his Nibelung-Nazis crushed, Friedelind had sped back to Bayreuth from New York determined to get the festival on its feet again. No one would have been even faintly surprised. The daughter-in-exile had just resoundingly confirmed in Heritage of Fire what she had told all and sundry for years – that since childhood she had felt a burning sense of mission to carry on her father’s work. She was a more than competent pianist and singer, she had plenty of contacts in the musical world from Toscanini down and, as a long-standing anti-Nazi, she was the only member of her family wholly ‘politically correct’. Everything seemed to speak in her favour, not least that she indisputably was a descendant of Richard Wagner (unlike ‘Cousin Franz’ Beidler who had never been legally recognised as such) and a direct beneficiary of Siegfried’s will. Yet she delayed her return until 1953 by which time the festival, run by her brothers, was in full swing again and most doors were closed to her. Why?

  The answer is far from straightforward. Friedelind herself gave part of it – but no more – in a long letter she wrote to New York’s Musical Courier in late 1949 responding to repeated queries about Bayreuth’s future. She noted that soon after the war she had received invitations to return home and take over ‘both from German quarters as well as from American Occupation Authorities’, but in those bleak days she had judged the very idea of holding a festival to be inappropriate. Since then things had become little better. It was true that the Bavarian government wanted to see the festival restarted as a tourist attraction and even seemed to have offered a subsidy – subject to the appointment of a business administrator to work alongside the Wagners. But ‘the only time in history when a German government took interest in us was under the Nazis,’ Friedelind recalled, ‘and we could well have done without this kiss of death.’ Bayreuth should try to pull through on its own ‘with the help of politically and economically disinterested lovers of my grandfather’s work’. If the festival were to reopen too soon this might ‘prove fatal both to its spirit (if there still is such a thing) and its finances’.1

  Besides her worry about economic conditions in Germany, Friedelind was increasingly pessimistic about the international situation. In a letter to Winifred a few months earlier, written when the Berlin airlift was still in full swing, she had warned that a still more serious East–West crisis was brewing and that any advance tickets sold for a newborn Bayreuth festival were bound to be returned. ‘Even here in the richest country on earth’, she added, worry about the future had become so pronounced that she had been unable to find enough guarantors for a ‘Friedelind Wagner Opera Company’ to tour the US with Tristan und Isolde. Perhaps she was, in part, trying to explain away her inability to win adequate backing; but it is a fact that by 1949 fears were indeed mounting of a new ‘hot’ war and even well-established US cultural bastions like the Met were having more trouble raising funds. Anyway, word that Friedelind’s tour plan had foundered was received by most of the Wagners with ill-concealed glee. Winifred and Wolfgang opined that the family’s ‘pipe-dreamer’ had been dealt a salutary lesson and even Wieland, who had originally designed the sets and costumes for the planned Tristan, sneered about ‘Die Maus Pleite’ (The Mouse Crash)2. No doubt he and his brother were still more inclined to Schadenfreude because their own plans were initially blocked for lack of finance. During the summer of 1949 they had sketched a skeleton programme for a mini-festival to be held in the following year, but had then had to abandon even that modest scheme as unrealistic. Perhaps that was just as well since in June 1950 communist North Korea invaded the south, redoubling worries that similar, Russian-led, aggression might be in the offing in western Europe and especially Germany. As Friedelind had guessed, it would not have been a good time to try to launch festivities, especially in a town barely an hour’s drive from the Soviet zone.

  Despite that sombre background, a head of fund-raising steam astonishingly did start to build up in Germany all the same – thanks not least to a newly founded Gesellschaft der Freunde von Bayreuth (Society of Friends of Bayreuth). Wieland was at first sceptical, recalling that in the past such ‘friends’ had sought to exert artistic influence on the festival in exchange for the cash they raised. He even went so far as to charge that ‘this blasted old Wagner club with its cliquish self-importance is getting out of hand again,’3 but he finally accepted the proffered help because he had to. At this key stage it was Wolfgang, pragmatic as usual, who seized the initiative. He drew up estimates of the funds needed, buzzed around Germany on his motorbike coaxing potential sponsors – and agreed not to prepare a production of his own for the 1951 festival so that he would have more time for the vital but inglorious task of business organisation. Wieland was rarely generous with praise, but in this case he remarked more than once that while the festival could do without him it could certainly not do without his brother. From the business viewpoint that was surely true, especially in those first years of struggle.

  From her Manhattan base Friedelind could not, or at any rate did not, keep abreast of all the ups and downs at ‘home’. She sent one CARE packet after another to the family and corresponded occasionally with her siblings, notably Wieland; but she did not write at all to her mother until May 1947, one month before the start of the latter’s denazification trial. Even then her letter was distant in tone, mainly posing questions about the family estate. Winifred, on the other hand, sent a string of at times anguished appeals to New York stressing that the case against her seemed bound to be drawn mainly from Heritage of Fire and that she could well be sentenced to a labour camp. At first she noted that she had not been able to get hold of the book and begged Friedelind to send a copy so that she could prepare her defence.4 She, Winifred, would pay the costs involved when she could scrape the money together ‘in better times’. Later, after obtaining Heritage elsewhere, Winifred wrote that she had found errors in it that she would be able to identify as such under interrogation by quoting from Friedelind’s own correspondence. Even that implicit threat brought no response; nor did more affectionate letters reporting on family and friends and ending with ‘Es umarmt Dich innigst Deine Mama’ (With warmest embraces, your Mama).

  From all that, it might seem that an implacably vengeful daughter was simply getting her own back on a domineering mother. But shortly before Winifred was due to appear in court, Friedelind abruptly changed tack. She fired off a telegram to Bayreuth demanding (unavailingly) that the trial be postponed, she pressed (successfully) for the exclusion of Heritage of Fire from prosecution evidence, and – hardly less surprising in the circumstances – she promised to phone her mother on 23 June to congratulate her on her fiftieth birthday.5 She kept her pledge, but in those post-war days of makeshift communication Winifred was unable to receive a transatlantic call in Bayreuth (let alone in the village where she lived) and instead had to trek to Nuremberg for the fifteen-minute chat. It is not clear just what Friedelind said to her beleaguered Mama in their first conversation for seven years, apart from ‘Happy Birthday’, but evidently Winifred felt the arduous trip worthwhile. Back in Bayreuth that night, she and other well-wishers celebrated with a bottle of champagne somehow drummed up at Wolfgang’s home in the Wahnfried gardener’s cottage. Mausi’s gestures of goodwill, especially her move to head off the use of her book against her mother, seemed a good omen for the imminent trial.

  Even if Heritage of Fire had been used in evidence it is unlikely that, on the strength of it, Winifred would have been judged a ‘major offender’ (rather than ‘merely’ an ‘activist’) and hence given the toughest possible sentence. Although the book contains many piquant details, they mainly round out a picture of the ‘Mistress of Bayreuth’ and her close relations with Hitler that the court was able to glean anyway. Friedelind’s eleventh-hour intervention, therefore, probably did not much influence her mother’s fate – but
it surely did raise or bolster doubts about the veracity of Heritage of Fire that have persisted ever since, especially in Germany. By urging that the book be barred from use in court the authoress seemed implicitly to admit what Winifred, backed to the hilt by Wolfgang, had argued from the start – that the text was often tendentious and in part pure fiction.

  Friedelind, in fact, acknowledged no such thing either then or later. She did get some things wrong (about Hitler’s first Wahnfried visit, for instance), she was guilty of ‘sins of omission’ (her relatively late anti-Nazi ‘conversion’) and she was arguably unfair in some of her personal judgements; but the bulk of her account is either independently confirmable or at least highly plausible. That goes not just for family details (like Cosima’s habits and history, the oddities of the ‘aunts’, the pranks of the ‘gang of four’) but for the behind-the-scenes revelations about the festival itself before and especially during the ‘Third Reich’. When Frida Leider got hold of the book, in its less than ideal German translation, she read it with ‘great interest and joy’ and judged it ‘very honest’. At least that is what the veteran soprano, who had been through such peaks and troughs in Bayreuth over many years, told her ‘dearest Mausi’ by letter from Berlin in 1946.6 It is unlikely that Frida would have gone out of her way to report so positively, even to flatter an old friend, had she really found the book mendacious or gravely error-prone.

  As for Friedelind’s by turns chilling and hilarious descriptions of Hitler – his theatrical rages and comic imitations, his abrupt switches of mood from charm to venom, his odd nocturnal and eating habits – they may well have seemed fanciful to some readers. But other accounts issued over the years, including the memoirs of foreign diplomats and members of the Führer’s own entourage, go far to confirm that the bizarre picture drawn in Heritage of Fire is not exaggerated. Nor is it true, as sometimes claimed, that Friedelind’s tale became distorted in the course of collaboration with Page Cooper, an American writer who helped prepare the manuscript for publication. Much of what appears in Heritage of Fire had already been revealed by Friedelind (albeit in less fluent English), either in the press or to British and American intelligence, well before she got down to completing her book in New York. There are a few discrepancies between the account in Heritage and the one in the transcript of Friedelind’s American debriefing, but they can probably be ascribed to the failure of the intelligence official concerned fully to grasp what he was told.